Summer

I know that, once again, it's been too long since I've updated my personal blog; please know that it's only because I am busy professionally and am about to share some wonderful news!

After a busy month of May, during which Brian and I were participants in the Emerging Leaders Dialogue in Sitka, Alaska followed by weeks thick with all kinds of articles and work, June arrived with the book publication and debut reading of the students to whom I taught poetry during the spring, followed by an amazing week in New York after which I am officially engaged to be married to Brian. (!) I am so happy, so excited, so inspired, and so, so in love.

I would love to say more, but, I am exhausted and waiting in an airport in Baltimore to return home after four wonderful days of photographing my dear friend's wedding and catching up with old friends, so I am just going to share photographs of the past few months and leave you with the promise that I will write (really, this time), very soon.

Hawaii, BA and Tim Easton

tim easton
Originally uploaded by brian_adams

Winter is finally giving way to spring, the appearance of pussy willow buds, hot dog stands and long days pushing aside the dark quiet nights into a kind of manic reemergence of life. The birds can be seen in the sky making their way back to us, the sounds of the city that have been muted beneath snow are now buzzing with energy.

I have so loved the winter, but I have never been more excited to toss aside the coat and walk through the streets freely beneath slim clothing.

After our adventures in Shishmaref, AK, BA and I boarded a plane to Kona, Hawaii, where we photographed our dear friends' M & A's wedding and made their wedding cake. When we landed in the airport, the humidity met us warm and shocking--we felt the comfort of t-shirts, jeans and tennis shoes, and it was wonderful. Throughout the week of our visit when we weren't assisting each other's artistic endeavors, BA and I spent afternoons wave-jumping in salt water, lying poolside with poetry and magazines, and skateboarding on soft, smooth pavement. We had a wonderful visit with friends old and new, and we left with sun-kissed skins and only good memories: traipsing together at the "edge of the world" with a herd of wild goats, picking wildflowers, and laughing on our air mattress late into the night.

It was my first trip to Hawaii, and although I found it far less photogenic than the mountains and ice of Alaska, I see why it is so beloved. There is something magical about the heat, about the green, verdant life sprouting up against an ever-blue sea cresting against a blackened shore.

Just two days after returning to Anchorage, I began teaching poetry classes to a group of brilliant "at-risk" youth ages 9 to 14, working with them to create a book of their poetry to premier at a May reading downtown. I am always so inspired by youth, especially those as talented and insightful as these children; they ask all the right questions, and their poems inspire my own. Among many things, working with this group of young people has me questioning why it is that so many adults lose the sense of wonder in the world around them with which we are all born. When is it that most adults stop asking questions about the world around them? When is it that we stop seeing?

This is what I love most about artists and about being an artist myself: art requires that we look, that we see, that we feel. It requires that we question, that we accept that most questions have no answers.

"We make our arts because we have to," Tim Easton said to me in a recent interview. "We make our art and we trust that our passions and our art will take care of us."

BA and I recently interviewed and photographed Easton while he was visiting and playing shows in Anchorage, and it was so enjoyable and inspiring that, like most stories we work on, it did not feel anything like work. We enjoyed coffee with Easton, drove to one of the most beautiful bluffs and beaches in Anchorage, spent a day being cold together and talking ("rapping" as Easton says), and then huddled together in the Taproot prior to his performance to enjoy a warm and satisfying meal. The next day, we were invited to an exclusive party and barbecue far up on the hillside, where the snow is still feet deep and spring feels months away. The sun glinted through light flakes as a group of musicians played music freestyle on a range of instruments inside; after filling up on some of the best barbecue I've had in my life, it was more than indulgent to enjoy their creative energy--it made me feel alive.

As BA and I pulled away from the party, our artistic souls and bellies satisfied, we looked at each other and smiled: summer is on its way.

2010, Part One

shishmaref, ak
Originally uploaded by brian_adams

It has been months since I've updated this blog, so first, let me say that I am bad at this and that I am sorry.

Thus far, 2010 has been a wonderfully exciting year of changes and travels, beginning with the birth of BA's nephew on January 28th. It was the first time that I've been very close to a birth--in the delivery room up until the final pushing--and although there are many things I could say regarding how I felt, the easiest is for me to say that it changed the way I view life. Witnessing the exhaustion of a woman during and after delivery, a father holding his son for the very first time, and a brand new life--veiny, and so very small--emerging into the world we so often take for granted, everything seemed simpler somehow. Why would we ever complicate our lives unnecessarily when it's amazing that we've made it at all? When we've already gone through so much?

During the month of March, BA and I embarked on the most exciting project I've worked on in a while--creating a multi-generational cookbook of Native Alaskan recipes in Shishmaref, AK. We traveled to Shishmaref for one week, during which we interviewed elders who contributed to a cookbook created in 1951 by the Shishmaref Day School (the receipt of which originally inspired the project), and then spent the rest of our time working with the school to gather new recipes from the current students or in the community visiting with families, discussing Native Alaskan foods and trying our fair share. The experience was exhilarating, both on a personal and professional level; Shishmaref is a beautiful place of welcoming people, breathtaking landscapes, and exciting foods. Read one of six published pieces of our trip here.

It's just another reason why I feel so blessed everyday to live in Alaska.

This being said, BA made a very big decision last week: we will be relocating to New York City in September where I will begin my MFA studies in poetry at the New School. We will return to Anchorage in the summer, and then again (for an indefinite/undisclosed time) to Anchorage after I've finished my degree and published my first book.

Right now, BA and I are working on the many post-production aspects for our book project, going to Hawaii to photograph a friend's wedding, and then, there will be more to write, I'm sure. (And, next time, I won't allow the months to pass without an update!)

Bash

bash
Originally uploaded by brian_adams

Life is so strange and terrifyingly beautiful if only you take the time to look.

When I asked my sister, B, what her favorite thing about living in Alaska was, she said that it was "how quickly the seasons change." Now, as we're gaining 5 minutes of sunlight a day, I know what she means. Darkness is not the same as the lack of light, and light is not the same as the lack of darkness. I can't say that I would ever have understood this as fully had I not moved here. It is not the same thing to be "not unhappy" as it is to be truly joyfully alive.

Here, changes and polarities notch the spine of understanding.

Lately, BA and I have been up to all sorts of things, from snowshoeing in a quiet wood of freshly fallen snow to throwing a surprise birthday party for L and a baby shower for R to interviewing local tattoo artists and applying for grants for a book project established to bolster support for Native Alaskan communities. In a word, we are busy; if there is no work, we make some.

It is, of course, the wonderful people in my life like BA and B that keep me going even when the work runs dry (and, my friends, it has!).

It is indescribably affirming to wake and retire everyday with another artist; there are the times when the scream beneath the surface rages and frustrates before it creates, but BA and his love of his work is an endless source of inspiration to me. That we both harbor a deep interest in and love of this world is nothing if not an assurance that we will find ourselves all over the earth, always doing what we love.

Last week, BA and I had the privilege of briefly meeting acclaimed poet, essayist, and social activist Nikki Giovanni, a woman who, at 66, has been publishing poetry for over four decades while working to bring matters of social justice into the public eye through her prolific essays and lectures. Last week, Giovanni was on fire; I attended expecting a poetry reading but soon realized that she was prepared to lecture for the full 1 1/2 hours--without any notes--on current politics, social justice, and civil rights, while also paying a tribute to her friend and inspiration Rosa Parks, who, according to Giovanni, is the "most important person of the 20th century."

Rock. On.

Nikki Giovanni, as you might expect, is not a closeted, stuffy, silver-spoon professor of English; she is a woman who says what she means (and means what she says) and an artist who has constantly pushed herself creatively throughout her life, creating works that make the world question itself. On Thursday, she proclaimed her support for gay marriage, claiming that one day we will look at the current laws and this struggle the way we now view miscegenation laws--with a kind of What the hell were they thinking? scowl.

This struggle, of course, is key; the struggle is the point of departure.

In a word, Nikki Giovanni is powerful--powerfully validated by her experience, wise, and compassionate. She harbors the sort of quiet intellect--the kind that truly has seen it all--that I hope to earn throughout my life.

Happiness and understanding, of course, do not come easily; these are fruits of a constant and effortful response to that creative drive within that spurs us on everyday to learn and create. It is a toil that is undertaken with a deep kind of gratitude--the kind that's hard to find sometimes--and a desire to see and feel and leave as much as we can before we die.

Before us, there was life. After us, what will there be?

A New Year

New Year's Weekend.
Originally uploaded by skinny.jeans

Hoar frost, which until now I had never seen, has begun to stick thickly to the branches of trees, icicles on houses, and even my eyelashes, so that the world looks strange and newly beautiful, coated in crystal. The cold arrives and wanes, the winter sky remains always in a brilliantly dosey state of twilight, and the sun runs along beside us but never overhead.

And so the new year begins in a place truly new to me.

The holidays were lovely and almost overly eventful, packed with new families, new friends, and new traditions; BA and I bought and decorated our first tree, MF and I shared our first meals, B and L and BA and I shared our first Christmas Eve, and I had not one but two first Christmas stockings, both appropriately stuffed. I deeply missed my holidays with my family (though I'm happy that we were able to skype and talk on the phone!), but I was so welcomed by BA's family and L's family, that I felt anything but lonely. And, of course, MF is a beautiful, genuine, and interesting creature, as I knew that she would be. In all, the holidays were a time of opportunities to learn and love. (I often wonder how people who weren't deprived of these fundamental needs their whole lives see them--could they possibly appreciate them in the way B and I do?)

I realize that most of these opportunities were available to me because I've entered into BA's life, and were I not here, these would have still happened, just without me. This is what it is to move often: in this place where I am always the newcomer, I feel that I could just disappear and life would move on, unaffected by my absence. (It is a comfort, usually.)

In this crystalline winter, I am the visitor.